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Omid Shirazi
Omid Shirazi is an officer within the Alliance Intelligence Service. Biography Omid Shirazi was born in 2152 to a pair of well-off hydroponics engineers in Tehran, Iran, and was followed by a younger brother Amir, four years later. In 2165, the Shirazi family relocated to Anhur, where Mehdi Shirazi, her father, managed a food production facility on the mixed-species colony. Throughout her teenage years, she was provided a high-level education both on world and remotely, and as a consequence of Anhur’s unique population component of both humans and batarians, she soon developed a keen interest in batarian culture. This interest often got her into trouble with her family and human authorities, as the teenager would sneak into the batarian-majority parts of the city to talk to the few locals who would talk to a human. As Shirazi approached adulthood, the situation on Anhur worsened as human corporations struggled to economically compete with the batarian segment of the planet’s population, turning to increasingly unethical means. Tensions continued to rise over the years as corporations became more desperate and the population of the planet became more divided. With the situation deteriorating, Mehdi Shirazi was extremely grateful when his daughter earned a complete scholarship to Georgetown University to study political science, as it would mean that his intuition turned out to be accurate - slavery was legalized by the governing human corporations, sparking a violent division between human-majority abolitionists, and the pro-slavery batarian-majority Na’hesit. At Georgetown, Shirazi studied political science, minoring in extraterrestrial linguistics, and continued to hone her fascination with the batarian species. While there, she forged a close relationship with Professor Elan Goldberg, an Extraterrestrial Studies fellow, and more notably, a recruiter for the Alliance Intelligence Service. In her final year of studies, Goldberg approached Shirazi with a proposal - join the Alliance Intelligence Service, and apply her studies to the task of protecting humanity in the newly discovered galactic order. Upon graduating from university in 2174, Shirazi was accepted into the AIS training program, where she was schooled in tradecraft, interrogation techniques, infiltration, and intelligence analysis. While other students chose to focus more on combat skills, Shirazi instead elected to focus heavily on bolstering her ability to extract information peacefully, being heavily influenced by AIS instructor Danil Stavros. Stavros was a proponent of low-impact operations, gathering intelligence through local assets and infiltration in plain sight, as opposed to nighttime raids and extraplanetary renditions. After completing AIS training, Shirazi was qualified as an operations officer within the service and was immediately deployed to Mindoir in 2175, where she worked to curb the influence of a Russian mafia group during the reconstruction of the colony post-2170, which was concluded when she arranged the murder of two senior enforcers by framing them for embezzling from their superiors. Shirazi was deployed to Anhur with Stavros as her senior officer in 2176, due to her knowledge of the local population. While the Systems Alliance was officially neutral in the brewing civil war on the independent colony, the Alliance Intelligence Service was working closely with special forces units assisting the abolitionist rebel groups. On the opposite side of the conflict, covert Hegemony SIU teams were rumored to be operating on Anhur, and were the primary target of the efforts of Shirazi’s team. The AIS officers worked to coordinate arms shipments to rebel groups, provide intelligence to Special Forces units operating in-system, and identify SIU teams working to interfere with their efforts. The AIS, including the small team of operatives under Danil Stavros, was instrumental in securing the deal between Eclipse and the outgunned abolitionist groups - that deal would prove instrumental in the human victory on Anhur. In the midst of the fighting, Shirazi reached out to her family, who had remained on Anhur throughout the conflict. Unable to conventionally compete with batarian hydroponics facilities using slave labor, Mehdi Shirazi elected to “hire” his own ultra-low wage laborers. Omid’s brother, Amir, did not share this sentiment, and covertly used the family’s unused facilities to house escaped slaves, and secretly fought for the resistance on the planet. Under the guise of returning to the planet working for a humanitarian NGO, Omid contemplated offering to help secure her family passage offworld before the fighting got worse, but decided against it, believing that it would draw further attention to them, and to her. Omid, and the other AIS officers in New Thebes were unaware that a pair of private contractors working with the Alliance were secretly reporting on their activities, including Shirazi’s visit to her family, to the SIU. When they finally discovered the treachery, it was too late - their team was forced to fend off a SIU assassination team in a close-range firefight that cost the lives of an AIS officer before the batarians retreated. Immediately following the engagement, the remaining intelligence personnel were given orders to evacuate the planet, with the situation becoming too dangerous to justify continued covert operations there. Shortly before their final evacuation, she witnessed a firebomb attack on her family’s home. In the aftermath, her father was killed, and her brother was missing, presumed dead. While a pair of abolitionist rebels were found responsible for the murders, Shirazi believes that the SIU team that pursued her team also targeted her family. The Anhur Rebellions left a permanent imprint on Shirazi’s psyche - she felt responsible for the deaths of her father and brother, that she had led the SIU team to her old home. That guilt had yet to fade, even by 2183. She also took note of the near-destruction of Anhur after the revolutions and would grow to believe that violent revolt would only harm innocents, rather than solve the problems that sparked the conflict in the first place. This would be the last time Omid ever spoke to her mother. Following the loss of her husband and son, the elder Shirazi retreated into herself, living alone in a small apartment back in Tehran. While her mother never openly said such things, Omid believed that she was the target of her mother’s blame for the deaths of her loved ones. For years following the Anhur Rebellions, Omid combed intercepted trade documents or intelligence reports from batarian colonies, looking for her lost brother. This search consumed much of her time between operations, to the concern of her superior officers and teammates as she neglected food and sleep to search for any fragment of information that could determine her brother’s location. However, no concrete evidence was ever gathered. Following Anhur, Shirazi and Stavros were stationed on Camala from 2179 to early 2181. The two posed as wealthy arms dealers, gathering information on Hegemony industry, slave-trading infrastructure on the colony, as well as on potential targets of opportunity within the upper echelons of batarian society. Early on, she was tasked with building a close personal and professional relationship with the deputy resource minister Gahtam Har’shad in an attempt to convert him into an unknowing Alliance asset. The culmination of these efforts came when Shirazi “borrowed” a small cell of batarian rebels from Stavros’ command, with the intent of staging, then thwarting an assassination attempt on the minister to seal his trust. The operation worked perfectly. The rebels staged their attack just as planned, and Shirazi’s security detail “luckily” was able to kill them all without any harm coming to herself or to Har’shad. Shortly afterwards, Omid and her former training officer nearly came to blows in an uncharacteristically heated argument. Stavros vehemently disagreed with the plan to callously sacrifice the rebels, and made his displeasure known, both to Shirazi and to his superiors. As a result, he was quietly transferred off Camala, and vanished shortly after. During the remainder of her time on the colony world, Shirazi worked closely with Luke Kerrigan, another AIS officer, on an operation to blackmail and disgrace a handful of hardline anti-human politicians. During the years of 2181-82, Shirazi was assigned to an operation on Bekenstein, infiltrating and working to bring down the Constantin crime family, reprising her cover as an arms dealer. After an unknown party leaked AIS operational details to the Constantin syndicate, her cover was blown and an assault on the family compound was launched prematurely by Alliance special forces. Many members of the Constantin crime family were arrested, though several escaped and remain at large. In early 2183, Officer Shirazi returned to Earth to begin her next posting, in San Francisco. Personality Shirazi is an extrovert and takes great pride in her gregariousness, firmly believing that one will get further from the world, and get more from others, by being a friendly face, as opposed to a dreaded presence. She seeks out new faces to meet and befriend, and that approach to life defines her methodology as an intelligence officer. In her career, she has found that rewarding cooperation and seeking to build a rapport with assets are far more successful than threats of punishment or physical harm. However, one must not mistake her friendliness for kind-heartedness. She is a natural manipulator, and holds little reservations about lying, cheating, or stealing her way to victory, and often has no compunction with deceiving and controlling others for her own goals, even taking advantage of her relationships with them. She often utilizes her carefully-cultivated friendly disposition to disguise these manipulations and lies, shaping her mannerisms, spoken opinions, and behavior to her audience. This has led to considerable strain within her personal life, as her close friends have expressed frustration with the fact that they do not know which “Omid” they are interacting with is the genuine one. It is often said that she is more comfortable in someone else’s skin than her own, especially given the deeply embedded sense of guilt she carries for what happened to her family on Anhur. Those same traits that make Shirazi an adaptable and capable intelligence officer, serve as an emotional crutch, providing her with a way to avoid facing her own trauma. Officer Shirazi is better-suited for small unit or solo operations, as she tends to have a high, if not slightly inflated sense of confidence in her ability to talk her way out of situations. This is not unjustified, as she has proven able to insert herself into or extract herself from numerous hostile situations. In a team, this may cause friction, as her confidence will lead her to butt heads with other team members, and while in the field alone, that same confidence will cause her to underestimate the risks involved with a strategy. While she does not possess a sense of ethics as most would see it, Shirazi is extremely dedicated to her principles of leaving as little impact as possible - that being a minimum number of casualties and collateral damage. She will look down on those she deems to be quick to violence, particularly frontline soldiers, though that belief has been tempered over the years of close work with Alliance Special Forces. She believes that in a war, the shooting itself is ancillary, with the outcome already decided through intelligence gathering and preparation. She has a soft spot for the finer things in life, whether they be high-quality clothing, fine dining, or even top-quality surveillance equipment. Additionally, she remains avidly interested in extraterrestrial cultures. Due to her upbringing on Anhur, Shirazi holds an uncommon attachment toward the batarian species. While she believes the Hegemony isn’t doing the species any favors, her interactions with individual batarians have left their mark. She sees many similarities between humanity and its rival species, and will react harshly to anti-batarian racism. This interest in the batarian species is highlighted by Shirazi’s efforts to learn some Terminus dialects of the batarian language. Also of note is that Shirazi is a loose adherent to the Shi’ah Islam faith. While she overtly references her religion often, and is an irregular attendee of one of San Francisco’s many mosques, she does not hold to many, if not most of the faith’s tenets. She holds to her family’s faith out of the aforementioned sense of guilt for their demise, but her desire to escape her own thoughts and feelings and become someone else drive her seemingly inconsistent approach to that belief. Another interesting trait is Shirazi’s habit of seeking out white noise when alone. This activity is part of a coping mechanism to avoid being alone with her thoughts, and manifests itself in a number of ways. She intentionally selected an apartment close to an active construction project, and when home, will almost always have music, audiobooks, or other recordings playing in the background. Physical Description Omid Shirazi stands at a height of 1.71m, and is of medium build, weighing in at 64kg. She keeps her dark brown hair tied into a tight bun or ponytail. Shirazi also has muddy green eyes, that can appear to be slightly green, or more brown depending on the lighting. Given her Iranian ancestry, she has olive-toned skin. Her facial features are generally angular, in particular her chin and nose. While adhering to the current Systems Alliance physical standards and exercising often, Shirazi does not place her physical prowess as a primary goal, and thus is not as well-built as other, more physically-oriented female members of the Systems Alliance military. Shirazi does not maintain a single style of outfit as a point of personal preference, but will more often than not be found in high-quality khaki pants and long-sleeved blouses of varying colors, accompanied by a generally expensive pair of leather shoes. While she does not dress formally, Shirazi takes pride in dressing with quality. During most field operations, she wears very light armor - a tan vest with hardened ceramic composite inserts in the front worn under her clothing, a concealed holster for her Welrod at the small of her back, and a hijab, though not for religious reasons. Her clothing and hijab are interwoven with metamaterial fibers, so that she can use her tactical cloaking ability even when not wearing a combat hardsuit. This is to allow her to operate in areas where a combat hardsuit would draw too much attention. In more combat-oriented situations, she wears the Aldrin Labs Wraith combat suit. On duty, Shirazi is capable of adjusting her verbal and body language to the requirements at hand, though this takes a not-insignificant amount of concentration and effort. When off-duty, she displays a more laid-back demeanor, she will often unconsciously adjust her body language and mannerisms to mirror her conversational partner. Armament Omid typically utilizes an XM-10 Welrod and M-12 Locust on combat missions, though when necessary she prefers to carry an M-13 Raptor as well. Her omni-tool is prepped with the combat abilities Decoy, Sabotage and Damping. She utilizes an RQ-200 Mosquito stealth drone when possible, and has affectionately nicknamed hers "Sah", a batarian word for troublemaker in the Keneshal dialect. Her armor is installed with a Tactical Cloak generator. Category:Humans Category:Characters Category:Alliance Intelligence Service Category:Anhur Rebellions Category:Intelligence Operatives